SPILL OIL PRODUCTION : Making Sense on Energy : Banning offshore drilling won’t help; making tanker operations safer and developing better cleanup methods will.

When an accident occurs involving an oil tanker, impassioned demands for eliminating offshore drilling usually follow. But eliminating offshore drilling won’t reduce tanker accidents and won’t make the environment cleaner. Nor is it in the interest of Californians.

Offshore drilling contributes almost nothing to ocean pollution, but it figures hugely in meeting California’s and the rest of the nation’s energy needs. With 1.6 cars per household, California is the third-largest consumer of gasoline in the world, behind the remainder of the United States and the Soviet Union. California produces only about one-half of the 2 million barrels of oil a day the state consumes. This includes the oil produced off California’s coast.

The entire nation currently relies on imports for almost 50% of its oil needs, and these imports represent nearly $50 billion a year of the nation’s trade deficit. A ban on offshore drilling would only worsen these statistics.

Indeed, by increasing the need for imported oil, an offshore drilling ban would increase tanker traffic--most of the oil we import enters the country by tanker. On the other hand, every additional barrel of petroleum we can produce here at home--offshore or onshore--will help reduce the number of tankers coming into U.S. ports.

Almost all of the oil produced offshore is moved ashore by pipeline--and the environmental record of the offshore oil and gas production industry is excellent. Of all the oil pollution detected in the oceans by a 1985 study of the National Academy of Sciences, only 2% worldwide came from offshore oil operations, far less than from municipal and river runoff and marine transportation.

Similarly, a Coast Guard survey in 1986, the most recent year the survey was compiled, showed that 610 barrels of oil were spilled during drilling operations in all federal offshore areas. However, more than 457 million barrels were produced. By contrast, the same year 150,000 barrels leaked into the ocean from natural underwater seeps in the Santa Barbara Channel.

Given a record that good, it is difficult to see how getting rid of offshore platforms will do much to improve the marine environment. But an offshore drilling ban could do substantial harm to the nation’s energy supplies, which in turn could harm the nation’s economy.

Federal offshore wells have already produced more than 8 billion barrels of oil and 85 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. These wells contribute about 15% of the oil and 29% of the natural gas that we produce each day. Moreover, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that we’ve tapped less than one-fourth of the oil potential of our federal offshore lands, which could hold as much as 29 billion more barrels of oil.

If the nation halted the orderly development of these resources, it could not easily turn on the spigot again whenever it wanted. Often it takes more than a decade of careful work to bring a major offshore discovery into full production.

In fact, it is unrealistic to think in terms of eliminating either offshore oil production or tanker traffic. Both operations are important to the task of delivering about 17 million barrels of oil that Americans use each day--to fuel their cars, trucks and airplanes, to heat their homes, and to manufacture countless products such as pharmaceuticals, plastics, and fertilizers.

The solution is not to ban offshore drilling, which has a good environmental record, but to make tanker operations safer.

Obviously, the five tanker spills that have occurred in the past year demonstrate that more needs to be done. To this end, a number of major oil companies hope to spend $393 million over the next five years to set up a major nationwide spill prevention and response network through the Petroleum Industry Response Organization. And the American Petroleum Institute has established a task force on marine personnel, which is recommending improvements in the training of tanker crews, such as improved bridge management and cargo handling. The institute is also supporting the crew-training recommendations of the International Convention on Study for Training Certification and Watchkeeping. In addition, Congress is about to enact legislation that greatly stiffens penalties for oil spillers.

Let’s do more to prevent oil spills and spend whatever is needed to contain and clean up spills that do occur.

Let’s promote a cleaner environment without decreasing the production of petroleum that this nation--and California--needs. Banning offshore drilling won’t do much for environmental protection--but it will jeopardize the economy and seriously threaten future U.S. energy security. That simply does not make good sense.